couchdb-dev mailing list archives

Hi all,
I think we should start considering providing binary downloads for our users.
The whole topic is a bit of a mess (see below), so I'd propose to start small.
1. This first iteration are links from couchdb.apache.org that are clearly
marked as "unofficial 3rd party binary downloads" that are not hosted on
ASF infrastructure.
2. Start with popular platforms.
3. Use the build-couchdb* script to create a fully self-contained directory with
CouchDB and all its dependencies in one place that can be rm -rf'd for
uninstalling.
* https://github.com/iriscouch/build-couchdb
The above circumvents several things that I hope we can resolve later, but that
I don't consider blocking us from getting the above started.
A. Official ASF releases. Of course, ideally, we should provide official ASF
binary releases, but I acknowledge that with a small community, we may have
trouble getting votes and testing for all popular platforms together.
The nice thing of the proposal above though is, that we can, at any time
promote an unofficial build to an official one by voting on it and changing
it's label on the downloads page.
B. There's many target platforms our users work with and we can't possibly try
to service them all at once. We can grow this operation as we get volunteers
to help out with each platform.
The nice thing here is that we can help a significant portion of users with
relatively little effort.
C. Using existing package managers. There are many advantages to use official
package managers for system installation and they should in fact be the
preferred way to set up a system, but they tend to be a little bit behind
with current releases.
I'd be super happy to also work with existing package managers to improve
the situation there, but I consider this to be outside of the scope of this
discussion.
What do you think?
Cheers
Jan
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